Tinworm-wings: April 2020

Wednesday 29 April 2020

Crash

BRIEF version

Taken over my shoulder, lying down. Air ambulance

Last summer, 4th July, I put myself in hospital. It is the subject of an Air Accident Investigation Report which will be published imminently. The BMAA magazine already let the cat out of the bag, for which they have apologised.

This will all be fairly humiliating. I don't come out of it well. The airworthiness of an aeroplane is the pilot's responsibility.

I took my wing off a few days previously to clean it. I got a very experienced friend, an inspector who has been around microlighting for many years, to help me re-rig the plane afterwards, as this was only the second rigging since I bought the plane.

As an SSDR aircraft it had been modified by the previous owner, who actually did a really good job of it. It is a good design, but you do have to remember what he told you about the process, and neither my friend nor I had remembered it. The front strut has two pins between the Jesus bolt and the pod. Because we hadn't unhooked the top one, we hadn't been able to slide the outer sleeve on the strut, so had found rigging the lower pin tricky, but finally my friend secured it, or so we thought.

Actually, the non-sliding sleeve covered the fact that my friend had failed to pass the pin through both the inner tube and the outer sleeve, so that the top half of the front strut was not secured to the bottom tube; the pin was sitting on top of it. I explained it better in my crash report (will look it out). The point is that the mistake is not visible, as the connection is covered by the sleeve. A conventional front strut does not have the sleeve, so the error would have been obvious.

When I took off, the wing lifted, gravity came into play and the front strut separated and swung from the Jesus bolt. I performed an emergency landing in crop, only just managing not to get impaled on the exposed strut anchoring point which was sticking up towards me. The trike folded over my back and the monopole broke over my arm.

I managed to get out and go and lie a safe distance from the trike, while some friendly hang glider pilots who had witnessed the whole embarrassing thing called the ambulance. Unfortunately I wasn't in a bad enough state to go for a free helicopter ride, but had to wait for the ground ambulance to pick me up. Nothing was broken, fortunately. I just needed strapping up etc.

But there is little left of the plane...except, very happily, the wing, which is ok. I am building a new trike, about which, more later.

Ground handling (how to store an aeroplane at home and get it to the airfield)

A trial flight in a Thruster, when I was 28, c.1991

I have started to learn to fly before...TWICE! First time round I had just graduated and got a job at an aerodrome in Cornwall, where I earned flying hours by fuelling microlights, giving hourly weather reports to the Met office etc. The weather was bad, so there was little flying to be had...and in the end I was paid with broken propellers and bits of crashed fuselage to hang on the wall. The boss was a great bloke called Ian Stokes, who had been a leading light in forming the BMAA and had manufactured Thrusters in the early days . In retirement he moved to The Gambia and became a publican and, shockingly, was murdered this year.

Flying Rogues

ten years on from my first experiences at Moorland Flying School (and now nearly ten years ago) the flying school was under new management and my girlfriend and I booked full courses. We both made good progress initially but never felt we were being moved on and had difficulty pinning the instructor down to signing our logbooks. When another instructor signed himself as P1, we got suspicious, contacted the CAA and were horrified to learn that our instructor did not have a current instructor rating, that we had not been insured and that none of our hours counted towards our licences. We were eventually refunded and the instructors were prosecuted by the CAA.

The very sympathetic CAA investigator spoke to the BMAA on our behalf and my hours have been allowed to count (at the discretion of the school). But in point of fact, I flew way over the minimum number of hours subsequently, so it is really quite academic in the end.

Around 2001 an instructor in Norfolk tried to convince me that if I bought his aeroplane he could teach me at a cut rate, as I'd then be using my own plane. Great idea, I thought, except that it turned out that the aircraft in question had failed a noise test and could not be used from the instructor's field. He later admitted that I would have to learn on his aeroplane at the normal rate. He resisted showing me the paperwork, kept avoiding me and eventually, when it was quite clear I wasn't going to buy without the paperwork, told me to F-off.

So far my experience has been that there are a lot of rogues in flying, which is one reason why I was so very impressed by the professional set-up at Sywell.

by air to Africa

My sister and I were lucky to fly many thousands of miles in the 1960s and '70s in many aircraft types, including BOAC VC-10s, Boeing 707s and even a Nigerian Airways Dakota, as our dad (and later our mum) had teaching posts in Kenya and Nigeria. Those were still the romantic days of flying, when passengers walked across tarmac and up steps, rather than walking down the tubes that have turned passenger flying into a mundane affair. (Mind you, aren't take-offs still incredibly exciting!?)

Back then air hostesses GAVE children the sorts of nick-nacks that their parents have to pay fortunes for from the airline catalogue these days; things like model aeroplanes, keyrings etc. We were also given sweets to help us cope with depressurisation. (And they were hostesses, so nobody give me a hard time)

Mum says that I cracked my first joke when I was small, on a flight out to Kenya, when I said, "Mummy, shouldn't there be a wing on this side of the plane too". Apparently I got her with that one.

At Kano airport I remember standing behind an engine and thinking how hot it still was....and then being told that the engine was cold. The heat was Kano. I got a headache and took several days to aclimatise.

The airport perri-ways at Kano were littered with aircraft that didn't make it, including a burnt-out Mig 15. The Nigerian Airforce flew them and my dad played squash with one of their pilots, Ben, at the Kano Club. I recall a Mig fly-past on my birthday. Was it arranged with Ben over a beer? Was it a pure coincidence?

At Entebbe airport (Uganda) I remember climbing down the steps on to the runway and being encircled by soldiers with machine guns, who then went through all our belongings and confiscated my cherished Swiss Army penknife, purchased on one of numerous European stop-overs. That was in the twitchy time after the Israeli hijacking ...and mum had to stifle my protests.

Before my first flight to Nairobi, as an infant, I was scared stiff. I didn't understand that I wouldn't have to sit astride the fuselage, as I did on my pedalcar! In a funny way, I not only overcame that fear but have come full circle; microlighting is just like sitting on that pedalcar......open to the elements - real flying!